David Friedman, former U.S. ambassador to Israel under the Trump administration, told Newsmax on Thursday that the best way to quell the crisis in the Middle East is to have Israel absorb the West Bank territories and integrate Palestinians there into their society.
Friedman's latest book, "One Jewish State: The Last, Best Hope to Resolve the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict," pushes against the decades-long hopes among the international community of joint Palestinian and Israeli states.
He told "The Chris Salcedo Show" that under one-state Israeli rule, Palestinians in the West Bank who integrate into Israeli society will be provided with better opportunities to succeed.
"One Jewish state is the is the opposite of what all the people are screaming and yelling on college campuses when they say Palestine from the river to the sea," said Friedman, a key broker of the Abraham Accords that normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states. "It's really ... Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria, what people refer to as the West Bank."
But Friedman said it's not a hostile takeover. Because Israel has achieved higher levels of business and commerce than its Arab neighbors, implementing sovereignty over the West Bank would help secure the region.
"The Palestinians will benefit from connecting to Israel, which is the only success in the region," he said. "And I would add, you know, the cherry on top is that it actually fulfills the will of God because this is exactly what God said should happen in the book of Genesis, and this is what the prophets all viewed."
Friedman said the Gaza Strip is exempt from his calculations of one-state Israeli rule, given the turmoil in the region since Iranian-backed Hamas terrorist attack Oct. 7 in southern Israel.
"Right now, Gaza is so raw and so complicated," Friedman said. "Until that rebuilding occurs, I'm going to leave it alone because it's really on life support right now. But in the West Bank, which is really the heart of biblical Israel, it has become somewhat radicalized that it's going to get worse and worse and turn into Gaza unless someone takes over that actually has the ability to deradicalize it by offering opportunities and prosperity and human dignity to the people who live there, Jews and Palestinians alike."
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